Robert Browning's "Incident of the French Camp" is an example of the more stirring small happening. Books of travel are largely series of incidents, but because of the continued presence of the same personality fall into a class distinct from this. Good letter-writers are usually fascinating relators of incidents. Cowper, Jane Welsh Carlyle, Dorothy Osborne, Gray, Lowell, Edward Fitzgerald, charmed not only their correspondents but all their later readers. The earlier accounts of his life away from home that "R. L. S." sent back to his mother contain exquisite small bits of narration. =A Near Tragedy= A most tragical incident fell out this day at sea. While the ship was under sail, but making, as will appear, no great way, a kitten, one of four of the feline inhabitants of the cabin, fell from the window into the water: an alarm was immediately given to the captain, who was then upon deck, and received it with the utmost concern. He immediately gave orders to the steersman in favor of the poor thing, as he called it; the sails were instantly slackened, and all hands, as the phrase is, employed to recover the poor animal. I was, I own, extremely surprised at all this; less, indeed, at the captain's extreme tenderness, than at his conceiving any possibility of success; for, if puss had had nine thousand instead of nine lives, I concluded they had been all lost. The boatswain, however, had more sanguine hopes; for, having stript himself of his jacket, breeches, and shirt, he leapt boldly into the water, and, to my great astonishment, in a few minutes, returned to the ship, bearing the motionless animal in his mouth. Nor was this, I observed, a matter of such great difficulty as it appeared to my ignorance, and possibly may seem to that of my fresh-water readers: the kitten was now exposed to air and sun on the deck, where its life, of which it retained no symptoms, was despaired of by all. The captain's humanity, if I may so call it, did not so totally destroy his philosophy as to make him yield himself up to affliction on this melancholy occasion. Having felt his loss like a man, he resolved to show he could bear it like one; and, having declared he had rather have lost a cask of rum or brandy, betook himself to thrashing at backgammon with the Portuguese friar, in which innocent amusement they passed nearly all their leisure hours. But as I have, perhaps, a little too wantonly endeavored to raise the tender passions of my readers in this narrative, I should think myself unpardonable if I concluded it without giving them the satisfaction of hearing that the kitten at last recovered, to the great joy of the good captain; but to the great disappointment of some of the sailors, who asserted that the drowning a cat was the very surest way of raising a favorable wind: a supposition of which, though we have heard several plausible accounts, we will not presume to assign the true original reason.